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The International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) B1 data was recently rescued by NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). ISCCP B1 data are geostationary imagery from satellites worldwide which are subsampled to 10 km and 3 hourly resolution. These data were unusable given the disarray of format documentation and lack of software for reading the data files. After developing access software, assessing data quality, and removing infrared window calibration biases, the data have been used for research in studying tropical cyclones and is available for other topics, such as rainfall and cloud cover. This resulted not only in valuable scientific data for weather and climate research but also in important lessons learned for future archiving of scientific data records. The effort also exemplifies principles of scientific data stewardship.
Kenneth R. Knapp (2008) studied this question.